Egypt's poorest — the revolution's real challenge

GETTING VOCAL: For these residents of the Dewika slum on the outskirts of Cairo who are demanding new homes, it may be a futile move as strikes and protests have been outlawed on the grounds that marginalised groups should stay quiet until the transition to civilian democracy is complete..
| Photo Credit: Amr Nabil

Experts believe a sea change in social attitudes is needed if the gains won through the anti-Mubarak uprising are to be felt equally across Egyptian society.

The residents of al-Me'adessa street have no idea when the rocks will fall: it could be at night while the neighbourhood is sleeping, or during the day when children are up playing on the roof. But they do know that the clifftop towering 20 metres above their ramshackle homes is slowly crumbling, and that eventually it will collapse down upon them — as it has already done a few kilometres along the road, killing more than 100 people who were living below.

“Every minute of every day, we live in fear,” said Umm Rahman, a mother of three. “We want to get out of here now, but there's nowhere else to go.” Most Egyptians will never have heard of al-Me'adessa street, a tangle of electrical wiring, scattered construction debris and steep mounds of domestic waste nestled deep within one of Cairo's poorest informal settlements in the shadows of the Mokattam mountain. But the struggle being waged here has laid bare the staggering obstacles ahead for the architects of the new, post-Mubarak Egypt — and raised divisive questions about what the country's revolution really stands for.

Sprawling slum areas

Al-Me'adessa is home to 150 families, part of a 12 million-strong community of Egyptians living in the sprawling, unplanned slum areas — known as ashwa'iyat, literally meaning random or haphazard — that have mushroomed over the past three decades as a result of sharp demographic growth, a widening chasm between rich and poor, and the indifference of the regime. Most live in homes that are unfit for humans or at grave risk of floods and, like Umm Rahman and her neighbours, rockslides.

Despite up to one million apartments lying empty across the capital as a result of years of property speculation under Hosni Mubarak, a dearth of affordable housing means that most have nowhere else to go. But now Egypt's ashwa'iyat community is beginning to raise its voice.

“In the past we were living without any respect for our lives,” explained Zamzam Mohamed Abdel Nabi, a 35-year-old resident of al-Me'adessa who has been leading a local campaign demanding that the government rehouse them. “Currently we're optimistic that things could change. But the state is still fragile and we don't want to profit from the situation.”

Her dilemma is a common one among the 44 per cent of Egyptians living below the poverty line: with old certainties dissolved and the nation in flux, now appears to be the perfect time to press for a better standard of living from a revolution that has already transformed the state's political apparatus.

But the country's ruling generals have cracked down harshly on what they call “sectoral” interests, insisting that Egypt is too unstable at the moment to meet the vast array of social expectations that have exploded since Mubarak's fall. Strikes and protests have been outlawed on the grounds that marginalised groups should stay quiet until the transition to civilian democracy is complete.

It is an argument that cuts little ice with Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International, who visited Cairo recently before the publication of an Amnesty report highlighting the appalling conditions of Egyptian ashwa'iyat and calling on the interim government to seize “an historic opportunity ... to ensure that the millions of underprivileged people are treated with dignity and their human rights respected.”

‘Was about inequality also'

“The revolution was as much about poverty and inequality as it was about political freedoms and repression of the civil kind,” Shetty told the Guardian. “The authorities cannot say they'll first deal with the political issues and then the socioeconomic issues — these have to be addressed together.” In recent weeks the lack of affordable accommodation has hit the headlines after residents of El-Nahda and El-Salam cities, who claim they were illegally evicted in the midst of this year's anti-government uprising, occupied the street in front of central Cairo's radio and television building, clashing several times with security forces. Egypt's Prime Minister, Essam Sharaf, recently announced £16m of funding for upgrading slum areas, but compared with the scale of the problem it represents little more than a drop in the ocean.

‘Cairo 2050'

Under Mubarak the authorities unveiled a grand vision of urban development in the capital named Cairo 2050, which aims to create an “internationally competitive” city and includes plans to “redistribute” millions of poorer residents. Public records suggest that much of the land currently occupied by ashwa'iyat is likely to be sold to luxury property developers, raising fears that Cairo 2050 is aimed more at property tycoons than at housing solutions for some of the city's most vulnerable people. Whether the plan will continue to be implemented remains to be seen.

Egypt's ashwa'iyat remain one of the great enigmas of the modern Middle East — densely packed, blighted by lack of investment and yet bursting with efficient, informally constructed support networks through which residents have built basic services for themselves.

But experts such as David Sims, author of a new book on Cairo, believe that a sea change in social attitudes is needed if the gains won through the anti-Mubarak uprising are to be felt equally throughout the population.